This made me laugh a little :)

Well, that's the thing. If TiVo has a patent on time-shifting using a harddrive, then that is what the patent covers. We may not like it, but then we should try to change the patent system instead of calling companies that try to defend the patents that they use in actual products "trolls".

You may not believe, that you should have to pay a fee just to use an SUV in London - but those are the rules that society has agreed upon. You have two options - get the rules changed or face the music when you don't follow the rules.

Now, if this was targeted at individual people building their own home made DVR, we could talk about trolling even though patents also cover those things. But here we're talking about AT&T and Verizon, two companies with a market cap of $156 billion and $88 billion respectively. They should know better. Okay, it's AT&T and Verizon - from what we hear about them on Slashdot, I doubt they DO know better. And if 10% of what we hear about here is true, they sure as hell don't deserve us defending them.

Well, there's 32GB to wear level over, so that helps, assuming they do proper full-volume wear leveling and not zone-based. I imagine much of the swap is fairly static on the phone. One hopes, at least. I know I won't be storing a bunch of stuff on it if I buy one. I'll use removable storage for that.

With TV so fragmented and diverse now it's very hard for all but few shows to break out of the scrum and gain an audience. Just as with film studios the networks don't want niche viewers for quality programs (well maybe PBS does) they want blockbusters with high viewer ratings and long term rebroadcast royalties and DVD sales. Nobody wants a good but low rated Firefly; they all want a mega-hits like Seinfeld. As for reality shows they're cheap to produce.

Interesting, if so why didn't you do? It is very easy to say things are obvious after the fact. For me it is obvious that planes can fly, and dead obvious why, that was not the case back then.

Now, if there is prior art, and if someone proves that WHEN they made it, is was pretty obvious how to do it efficient, kudos, and the patent will get invalid. If not, they have the right to go after anyone.

While this is true and all, they really need to pick a better way of going about this sort of thing instead of slinging hyperbole around. As it stands the "FSF" campaigns are hard to take seriously, I mean they really come off sounding like crackpots. I guess maybe they are. When you've the FSF essentially sling FUD (mostly fact-based but presented w/ an exagerated and alarmist style) by association all Free and to the extent that it is confused Open software developers, distributors, and users become crackpots by association in the public eye.

copyright infringement != stealing

When you steal from someone, they have actually lost something of value. When you infringe on someone's copyright, they aren't necessarily losing anything of value. Sure, they may have gotten money from you if you had purchased a license. However, you may not have felt that the license was worth the price they were asking and would not have given them anything regardless. It's a complicated concept, but to equate it with stealing requires many assumptions that aren't always true.

I'm sure they have plenty of cameras around their offices to find out if anyone is stealing from them. Would you let them put cameras in your house to find out if you are stealing from them?

>>>Erm. So a free web browser is anti-competitive because other web browser developers make you pay money for theirs?

Yes just the same way that if the Japanese started "dumping" their electronics onto U.S. shores for free, with the express goal of driving U.S. electronics companies out of business. That's essentially what Microsoft did to Netscape. There is simply no other explanation for why Navigator went from 90% to just 10% of the browser market in only two years time, except illegal dumping.

Well hell, why stop there? You can learn all about how to handle medical emergencies from WMD. If you're really nice, I'll even tell you how to open the debug console and set your score to 100.

>>>would Netscape have collapsed under its own weight anyway? Yes.

No. Netscape Navigator controlled ~90% of the market, and I continued using it for quite awhile, even when it had shrunk to just 10% of the market. It was *always* superior to Internet Explorer, just the same its "son" called Firefox is superior to IE.

Therefore the only way that IE could have beat the superior Navigator product was threw "dumping" - underselling below cost to drive the $30 Navigator out. And it worked.